


wake someone else up

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Ficlet, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-01
Updated: 2011-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:50:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 5:01 AM on a Sunday morning, and Mark Zuckerberg is thinking about zombies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wake someone else up

**Author's Note:**

> Written for salvadore_hart for her birthday! She prompted me with "Mark/Eduardo, it's always darkest before the dawn."
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://antistar-e.livejournal.com/569163.html?format=light).

-

 

 

It's 5:01 AM on a Sunday morning, and Mark Zuckerberg is thinking about zombies. 

There's no real reason for it, because it's not like he's sitting at the window with a shotgun in his lap (what do shotguns even look like? Mark, who has never actually seen one in real life, has only a vague idea, based mainly on memories of Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd from when he was five and had a tendency to just slurp at the milk in his cereal bowl instead of eating the actual cereal) watching a cluster of the undead shamble towards their last remaining refuge.

Although! Stylistically speaking, this would be a good night for a final showdown -- a bright, full moon and no fog, so if he _did_ have a shotgun, he could reasonably pick off a solid number of said shambling undead before he was overwhelmed. That's how this would go if his life was a movie.

(Thank god his life isn't a movie. That would be a really boring movie, and a hundred thousand years down the line, it would be the only remaining sample of American filmography and future archaeologists would assume that all humans from Mark's time period ate tuna right out of a can and only changed their underwear on a biweekly basis.)

But no, really. Mark Zuckerberg is thinking about zombies because everybody thinks about zombies. It's been culturally programmed into his generation the same way the Red Scare must have been for kids in the 50s.

Although maybe with less propaganda. And fewer cartoon squirrels.

Not that anybody's really _expecting_ a zombie apocalypse in the near future, but if there is one, are _you_ prepared?

It's five in the morning, and he's thinking about it, and he decides that yes, yes he is.

Mark has the self-preservation skills of a cockroach, okay, did you _see_ the way he evaded Cameron Winklevoss in the square the other day? If Mark can outrun a six-foot-tall future Olympian athlete, he can certainly outrun a zombie, it's not like they're exactly built for speed (or built logically at all, now that he's on the topic. Zombies don't really make a lot of anatomical sense. But Mark studies computer science, not biology, so he'll leave the skeletal-muscular logic for somebody who doesn't have three different quality .avi files of Shaun of the Dead on their external hard drive.)

So Mark can outrun a zombie, and he can definitely outlast one. In fact, he is _ready_ for an apocalypse. He pretty much stockpiles canned goods like a fucking boss already, it won't require much of a change in lifestyle.

He'll have to move, of course, because if the general population starts getting their brains munched on and the rest panic, then there won't be any kind of organized work-force at all and he's going to have to relocate somewhere to wait out the inevitable collapse of civilization, which is kind of pathetic, considering how much effort went into building it up in the first place. Five thousand years of hard work and a lot of trial and error, and one little zombie outbreak sends everything right back to square one. Mark will probably have to invent the wheel all over again. And fire, too -- he doesn't really know how to start one without a lighter, or a match (doesn't rubbing sticks have something to do with it?), and unless he camps out in a factory, he's going to run out of those.

And the electricity will go eventually, without people to run the power plants, so Mark's going to have to find one of those hand-crank generator things -- he's not even really sure what they look like.

He thinks they run on oil, he's not sure, so he's going to have to find a reliable store of that, too. And books, because while Mark is perfectly capable of surviving on canned tuna and garbanzo beans and high-speed Internet, eventually it's going to implode inwards like one of those Guatemalan sinkholes, and what's the point of doing something brilliant on the Internet if there's no one else left alive to appreciate it?

His bladder politely reminds him of its existence right around then, so Mark untangles himself from his laptop power cord and his blankets (it takes more coordination than the average human is capable of, but fortunately, Mark is marginally more intelligent than the average human,) and shuffles in sock feet to the bathroom.

"I'll need to find somewhere out of the city," he comments idly to his reflection in the mirror as he pees.

It's an uncomfortably loud sound, and for half a heartbeat, Mark thinks it'll somehow wake his roommates up.

He tilts his head at himself. "Away from any city, because there's all kinds of stuff that shouldn't be left unattended. And I bet you zombies aren't careful about not tripping over wires or sticking things in light sockets. So shit will probably burn down."

Skipping washing his hands -- come on, it hasn't killed him yet and what nobody knows won't hurt them -- he flips the light off and returns to his room. The backlight on his laptop has dimmed into sleep, so there's not even the glow of its screen to lead him.

It's quiet, he realizes: not strangely or completely quiet, because both the hard drive of his desktop and the mini-fridge are humming lowly, but even that can sound lonely when no one else is stirring.

Computers and fridges aren't living things, and this kind of quiet would trick even him into believing there's no one out there alive at all.

He plants a knee on his bed and cranes to look out the window -- even at ... 5:19 on a Sunday morning, usually there's still somebody, either dorm residents staggering through a walk of shame or joggers getting started on their morning routine -- but sees nothing outside but sidewalk, bare trees, and ridges of grey, slushy snow, turned black in the pale yellow of the street lights. Even when he strains his ears to the point where he can hear the ringing, he can't make out the sound of his roommates breathing.

It's kind of eerie, actually, and Mark resists the urge to slip out to check and make sure they're all still alive.

He's been on this side of the night often enough that the creeping sense of loneliness is almost familiar. Everyone else is asleep and has been for awhile and then there's him.

Awake.

Thinking about what he'd do in a zombie apocalypse.

By himself.

"Nuclear power plants!" he blurts out. "I forgot about those. Shit. Those are _definitely_ going to blow up with no one to monitor them. Will nuclear fallout kill zombies?" he asks the window ledge, settling back onto his haunches. "It'll certainly kill me, so I'm going to need to find a fall-out shelter. With a very strong door, because I'm also going to need to wait it out while the zombies eat the rest of the population and it would suck to build an adequate shelter and then have a zombie break the door down."

So here's the check-list:

In case of a zombie apocalypse, Mark Zuckerberg is going to need to outrun all the undead in the initial outbreak and find somewhere out of the city, somewhere south so he won't have to deal with snow and ice when winter sets in, somewhere preferably far out of immediate proximity to a nuclear power plant because the world's going to look like Chernobyl for 600 years and Mark doesn't want to see that, and somewhere with an independent power generator and a steady supply of food, water, books, and fire.

"Hm," he goes. "At this point, I think just getting eaten by zombies would be a lot less work."

The window ledge doesn't reply, so Mark studies the courtyard below again. Nothing's stirring. Nothing at all, like Mark's brain is successfully summoning it all to life -- all the people, picked off one-by-one, leaving the sidewalks and the buildings empty of the people they were made for, until there's nothing left but him. The thought makes all the hairs along his arms stand up.

With a soft "ugh" at himself, he gives into impulse and snatches his laptop up from his mattress. He slips out of the room.

Eduardo is stretched out on the sofa, just the right length to fit, toes curled into the cushions and his suit jacket pulled up around his shoulders in a makeshift blanket. His face is slack with sleep, and Mark waits until he sees his chest rising and falling for certain before he folds himself down on the hardwood floor in front of him, accidentally-on-purpose bumping the sofa cushion with the flat of his back, hard enough that Eduardo jerks and sucks down breath like he's surfacing from somewhere deep.

"Mark?" he goes, a rough sound more sleep and syllable than name. His hand slips out from underneath the jacket, kneejerk, and since it's not aiming very well, he winds up with a loose fistful of Mark's hair.

He makes a disgusted noise, sounding more awake and more like Eduardo. "When was the last time you washed your hair, Mark," he asks, flat, and Mark cranes his neck around in time to catch Eduardo rubbing his fingertips together, like he's checking for oil sheen.

"That level of personal hygiene comes more from societal expectations than real need, and would be completely unnecessary in case of a zombie apocalypse," Mark informs him, flicking the latch on his laptop. It whirs to life, seemingly very loud in the quiet room.

"... kay?" offers Eduardo.

Mark catches the flutter of his eyelashes in his peripheral, and his fingers sleepily starfish through Mark's hair again. His nails scratch lightly, without purpose, along his scalp, like he doesn't even realize he's doing it.

Eduardo's already falling back to sleep, unperturbed by Mark tucking himself up the floor just for the sake of his company. It's 5:39 on a Sunday morning, and Mark isn't really thinking about zombies anymore.

"It'd probably be too difficult to survive the apocalypse," he murmurs, leaning close enough to feel Eduardo's body heat. "People need other people too much."

 

-  
fin

 

 _“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.”_  
— Lemony Snicket

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] wake someone else up](https://archiveofourown.org/works/446181) by [knight_tracer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer)




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